I’m an advisor for 80,000 Hours, which means I talk to a lot of thoughtful people who genuinely want to have a positive impact with their careers. One piece of advice I consistently find myself giving is to consider working on pressing world problems you might not have explored yet.

• Check out our list of the world’s most pressing problems — or read our advice on how to think about the question for yourself.

Should you work on climate change or AI risk? Mitigating antibiotic resistance or preventing bioterrorism? Preventing disease in low-income countries or reducing the harms of factory farming?

Your choice of problem area can matter a lot. But I think a lot of people under-invest in building a view of which problems they think are most pressing.

I think there are three main reasons for this:

1. They think they can’t get a job working on a certain problem, so the argument that it’s important doesn’t seem relevant.

I see this most frequently with AI. People think that they don’t have aptitude or interest in machine learning, so they wouldn’t be able to contribute to mitigating catastrophic risks from AI.

But I don’t think this is true. There are potentially really impactful roles for reducing AI risk in:

• AI governance and coordination
• Operations management
• Information security
• Communications
• And more

Many roles in these fields don’t necessarily need you to have a background in ML or technical expertise. In general, I think that there are lots of ways to contribute to most problems.

Once you’ve determined which problem you’d like to solve, it’s much easier to try and identify which paths might suit you best.

2. People often fail to explore different issues because they become focused on one problem, such as climate change or AI. They believe, in my view correctly, that these are among the world’s most crucial issues, but then stop looking for alternatives.

This approach can be limiting. This is particularly true for those skilled in operations, fundraising, or policy-making since these skills are applicable across many issues. Others may have strengths that are especially well suited to a particularly pressing problem. If you’re a little flexible with your cause selection, you’ll increase your chances of finding very impactful work.

For example, Gregory Lewis, who has written articles for 80,000 Hours on biorisk, thinks AI risk is probably the most pressing problem in the world. But his reasoning didn’t stop there. In part because he has a background as a doctor, he concluded that he’s best suited to working on preventing catastrophic pandemics.

3. Some people defer too much to other people and organisations like 80,000 Hours who work on cause prioritisation full time.

This came up recently on our podcast. Lennart Heim, who researches compute governance to reduce risks from AI, initially underestimated the value of his expertise in hardware because he assumed that if it were significant, someone else would already be working on the topic. He later realised that important issues can go unnoticed, and he took the initiative to work on it himself.

There are other cause areas — like US-China relations and improving information security — that 80,000 Hours prioritises now much more now than we once did. People with skills in these areas might’ve undervalued their ability to contribute if they had simply deferred to us before we recognised the importance of these areas.

Another way this can go wrong is that some people work on problems they haven’t investigated, leading to low motivation and burnout. I’ve advised people who got jobs working in an area just because they heard it’s important, but once they were there, they found it hard to buy into the organisation’s approach to having an impact.

So, how much time should you invest in your cause prioritisation investigation? That’s a tricky question, but we have a blog post that offers some guidance.

If you’re grappling with some of these questions, we recommend that you apply for advising! We’re here to give personalised advice to help our advisees increase their positive impact.

Learn more:

• Can one person make a difference? What the evidence says.
• What are the most pressing world problems?
• Why the problem you work on is the biggest driver of your impact

The post Why many people underrate investigating the problem they work on appeared first on 80,000 Hours.

We’ve argued that you should approach your career like a scientist doing experiments: be willing to test out many different paths and gather evidence about where you can have the most impact.

More generally, this approach of open truth-seeking — being constantly, curiously on the lookout for new evidence and arguments, and always being ready to change our minds — is a virtue we think is absolutely crucial to doing good.

One of our first-ever podcast episodes was an interview with Julia Galef, author of The Scout Mindset (before she wrote the book!).

Julia argues — in our view, correctly — that it’s easy to end up viewing the world like a soldier, when really you should be more like a scout.

Soldiers have set views and beliefs, and defend those beliefs. When we are acting like soldiers, we display motivated reasoning: for example, confirmation bias, where we seek out information that supports our existing beliefs and misinterpret information that is evidence against our position so that it seems like it’s not.

Scouts, on the other hand, need to form correct beliefs. So they have to change their minds as they view more of the landscape.

Acting like a scout isn’t always easy:

• There’s lots of psychological evidence suggesting that we all have cognitive biases that cloud our thinking.
• It can sometimes be really painful to admit you were wrong or to come to think something unpleasant, even if that’s what the evidence suggests.
• Even if you know you should change your beliefs, it’s difficult to know how much they should change in response to new evidence — the subject of our interview with Spencer Greenberg.
• Having good judgement is actually just a difficult skill that needs to be practiced and developed over time.

But if we want to form correct beliefs about the world and how it works, we have to try.

And if we want to do good, forming correct beliefs about how our actions will impact others seems pretty crucial.

Why are we talking about this now?

Up until a few weeks ago, we’d held up Sam Bankman-Fried as a positive example of someone pursuing a high-impact career, and had written about how we encouraged him to use a strategy of earning to give.

Sam had pledged to donate 99% of his earnings to charity — and a year ago his net worth was estimated to be more than $20 billion. We were excited about what he might achieve with his philanthropy.

On November 11, Sam’s company, FTX, declared bankruptcy, and its collapse is likely to cause a tremendous amount of harm.

Sam appears to have made decisions which were, to say the least, seriously harmful.

If newspaper reports are accurate, customer deposits that were meant to be safely held by FTX were being used to make risky investments — investments which left FTX owing billions of dollars more than it had.

These reported actions are appalling.

We failed to see this coming.

So this week’s thoughts on the scout mindset are as much a reminder for us at 80,000 Hours as anyone else.

In the coming weeks and months, we want to thoughtfully examine what we believed and why — and in particular, where we were wrong — so we can, where needed, change our views.

There are so many questions for us to consider, in order to shape our future actions — here are a few:

• To what extent is the collapse of FTX evidence that it was always going to be hard to earn to give on a very large scale without causing harm?
• The FTX Future Fund was a major philanthropic funder in many of our top problem areas. Is the resignation of the Fund’s staff, and the collapse of the Fund, evidence that we should be more suspicious of very rich donors by default? In what ways might funding sources affect the approaches taken in attempting to solve problems? In particular, how should we make sure our research findings aren’t unduly influenced by our funders?
• How does the loss of potential funding for some of the world’s most pressing problems affect their neglectedness?
• How should this impact our views of which career paths seem highest impact?
• Should we be conducting more research into topics like how people trying to do good can end up making things worse?
• How should the effective altruism community change in response to this moving forward?

There aren’t yet clear answers to these questions.

As we learn more about what happened and the wider effects of the collapse of FTX, we’re going to do our best to act like scouts, not soldiers: to defend beliefs only if they’re worthy of defence, and to be prepared and ready to change our minds.

We’ve released a statement regarding the collapse of FTX, and hope to write more on the topic soon.

We’re optimistic that the work of identifying, prioritising, and pursuing solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems will continue. We hope you’ll be with us in that project.

Learn more

• Rob Wiblin shares his personal reaction to the FTX bankruptcy on The 80,000 Hours Podcast (November 23)
• Why “scout mindset” is crucial to good judgment — Julia Galef’s TEDx Talk
• Podcast (September 2017): Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad
• Ways people trying to do good can make things worse, and how to avoid them
• Considering considerateness: why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate
• Doing good together: how to coordinate effectively, and avoid single-player thinking
• From Open Philanthropy’s co-CEO Holden Karnofsky: Some comments on recent FTX-related events (November 10) and My takes on the FTX situation will (mostly) be cold, not hot (November 18)
• A job matching service for affected FTX Future Fund grantees (November 21)

The post Why being open to changing our minds is especially important right now appeared first on 80,000 Hours.